You may have seen Donald Trump and Elon Musk circulating online video. Recreates scenes from TV shows Breaking Badfor example. You may also have seen footage of them going to the hit “YMCA” of the villagers during the Great Year Day Party.
The problem is that one of these things actually happened, and the other is fiction created with artificial intelligence (AI). You may remember both, but which one is *?
In psychology, the “source monitoring framework” describes the processes involved in identifying where our memories came from.
The framework records the source of memory as a single piece of information. It is encoded into memory, along with other aspects of what we have experienced.
“Tags” that indicate where the memory comes from can easily disappear even if other aspects of memory persist.
In this way, clips generated by AI carry the risk of becoming blurred in our minds with real-world events. And this is an issue that can get worse as AI video improves.
This separation between the content of memory and its source always occurs. You recognize that the actor's face is on screen, but despite his familiarity, can't you remember any other movies or TV shows you've seen?
These same memory failures help explain how easy it is to form “fake memories,” as shown in Professor Elizabeth Loftus's work.
She observed that when certain ideas were proposed to us by others, we reminded them in our own minds, but later we forget where the ideas first came from. After that, you can easily mistake it for an event that actually happened.
Based on the findings of Loftus, it appears that AI can plant many false memories in our minds, especially when consuming artificial content in a similar setting to where it consumes real news.
So there is an important debate about how to brand AI-generated content and how to make it easier to remember that it is not real.
*For the record, the dance at the New Year's Eve party was authentic.
This article is the answer to the question (asked by Christopher Wiley of Birmingham): “Does artificial intelligence give us false memories?”
Please email us to submit your questions Question @sciencefocus.com or Message Facebook, xor Instagram Page (don't forget to include your name and location).
Check out our ultimate Fun fact More amazing science pages
read more:
